The Queer Renaissance

Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities

Robert McRuer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780814796450
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots ushered in the contemporary gay liberation movement, overt representations of same-sex desire in American literature and the arts were few and far between. Even in the 1970s, when gay and lesbian cultures began to register on our national consciousness, such work was still quite rare.

In the 1980s and 90s, however, all that changed. The Queer Renaissance puts a name to the unprecedented outpouring of creative work by openly lesbian and gay novelists, poets, and playwrights in the past two decades. This volume is one of the first to analyze critically this cultural awakening and is one of the only books to consider the work of gay male and lesbian writers together. Most importantly, The Queer Renaissance is the first book to consider how this wave of creative activity has worked in tandem with a flourishing of radical queer politics.

The Queer Renaissance explores the work of such important figures as Audre Lorde, Edmund White, Randall Kenan, Gloria Anzalda, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Schulman to question the dichotomy between art and activism. In addition, The Queer Renaissance interrogates the ways queer theory deploys, intersects with, and contests contemporary theoretical movements such as cultural studies, feminist theory, African American theory, and Chicano/a theory.

Chapter One
Boys’ Own Stories and New Spellings of My Name: Coming Out and Other Myths of Queer Positionality

Myths of Queer Positionality

In The Beautiful Room Is Empty, Edmund White’s nameless narrator envisions a day when gay people will claim the right to define themselves: “Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis” (226). This exhilarating thought comes to White’s protagonist as he finds himself in the middle of an uprising at the Stonewall Inn Bar in Greenwich Village on the night of June 27, 1969. Drawing on Civil Rights rhetoric, the protagonist and his friends reclaim and reposition their own experiences with chants such as “Gay is good” and “We’re the Pink Panthers” (226).¹

Although White’s account is fictional, the riots outside the Stonewall Inn are generally considered the beginning of the contemporary gay liberation movement. They did indeed usher in a decade of redefinition by lesbian and gay communities. Within weeks, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) had formed, employing the slogan “Out of the Closets and into the Streets!” Within a year, the Radicalesbians, influenced by both gay liberation and the women’s movement, had presented feminists with the “woman-identified woman,” a position that they hoped would facilitate the formation of challenging, politicized coalitions among women. By 1974, activists had successfully removed homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) list of mental disorders. In short, the new names and identities embraced by White’s protagonist and his friends were high on the agenda for early gay liberationists.²

These newly available gay and lesbian identities were claimed and proclaimed through the act of “coming out.” This act provided lesbians and gay men with positions that could serve as starting points for the radical political action the early gay liberationists believed was necessary to reconfigure the systems of capitalism and patriarchy responsible for gay and lesbian oppression. Indeed, the very slogan of the gay liberationists (and the title of a 1972 essay by Allen Young), “Out of the Closets, into the Streets,” suggests not simply that one claims a position (”out of the closet”) but that one moves from that position to effect radical social change. Young writes, “Of course, we want to ‘come out/. . . But the movement for a new definition of sexuality does not, and cannot, end there. . . . The revolutionary goals of gay liberation, including the elimination of capitalism, imperialism and racism, are premised on the termination of the system of male supremacy” (10). Similarly, “woman-identification,” according to the Radicalesbians, could be “develop [ed] with reference to ourselves, and not in relation to men. This consciousness is the revolutionary force from which all else will follow” (Radicalesbians, 176). Like the identity positions (pro)claimed by all the so-called new social movements, the identities into which gay and lesbian activists “came out” were collective identities meant to generate radical social change based on new and different ways of understanding the world.³

Coming out generally does not have the same radical edge for the new generation of queer activists, or for the writers of the Queer Renaissance, that it had for their gay liberationist forebears. On the contrary: coming out, along with its product—one’s “coming-out story”—has been thoroughly critiqued by many contemporary lesbian and gay writers. In particular, theorists have critiqued coming-out stories for their emphasis on the “discovery” of an individual and essential gay identity, unmarked by other categories of difference, such as race or class. This chapter briefly surveys these and other criticisms but simultaneously attempts to lay the theoretical groundwork for a reclamation of coming out’s radical potential. Specifically, through readings of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, I consider whether a feminist-informed and antiracist analysis might redefine the parameters of the coming-out story, shaping it into a myth of what I call “queer (op)positionality.”

Through the term (op)positionality, I intend to invoke the “opposition” to established and oppressive systems of power that was voiced by the GLF, the Radicalesbians, and members of all the new social movements, and that has been rearticulated in the contemporary Queer Renaissance. I also intend to invoke “positionality” theory (or “standpoint epistemology”) as it has evolved in recent feminist writing. Standpoint theorists, often explicitly citing both the strengths and the weaknesses of the social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, argue for a nonessentialized “position” from which to forge coalition-based political action.⁴ Linda Alcoff, for example, argues, “If we combine the concept of identity politics with a conception of the subject as positionality, we can conceive of the subject as nonessentialized and emergent from a historical experience and yet retain our political ability to take gender as an important point of departure” (433). As Alcoff sees it, this new position is both fluid and relational: “being a ‘woman’ is to take up a position within a moving historical context and to be able to choose what we make of this position and how we alter this context,” so that “women can themselves articulate a set of interests and ground a feminist politics” (435).

Similarly, Donna Haraway’s feminist redefinition of “objectivity” argues for an openly acknowledged, although partial, position or perspective. Haraway writes, “Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object” (190). This partial perspective is necessitated since, not unlike Edmund White’s narrator in The Beautiful Room Is Empty, with his concern about psychiatric diagnoses, Haraway confesses that she has occasional paranoid fantasies about so-called impartial, “objective” discourses that appropriate “embodied others” as “objects” of knowledge:

Academic and activist feminist enquiry has repeatedly tried to come to terms with the question of what we might mean by the curious and inescapable term “objectivity.” We have used a lot of toxic ink and trees processed into paper decrying what they have meant and how it hurts us. The imagined “they” constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories; and the imagined “we” are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body. (183)

Because of these fears, Haraway’s redefinition of “objectivity,” like the rhetoric of gay liberation, gives preference to other ways of seeing, particularly those ways of seeing that emerge from what she calls the “standpoints of the subjugated.” She writes, “‘Subjugated’ standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world” (191). Such standpoints are actually more “objective” because they do not claim to see, simultaneously, “everything from nowhere” (189) or “to be,” as Richard Dyer puts it in his analysis of the social construction of whiteness, “everything and nothing” (Dyer, 45). Such standpoints are more “transforming” because a coalition politics that emphasizes working together across difference is fundamental to what theorists of positionality envision. Indeed, this model would not have been shaped in the first place if feminists of color had not called for a more rigorous analysis of the differences within feminism and for an ongoing interrogation of the ways in which feminist concerns overlap with the concerns of other groups. Both Haraway and Alcoff, consequently, place race as well as gender at the center of their analyses: to Haraway, the category “women of color” “marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship” (Haraway, 156); to Alcoff, positionality theory “can be readily intuited by people of mixed races and cultures who have had to choose in some sense their identity” (Alcoff, 432).

Other theorists, recognizing the value of such coalition-based and self-reflexive positionality, have attempted to link gay male and feminist standpoint theory. Earl Jackson, Jr., for one, begins his study of Robert Glück by acknowledging, “One of the most important things gay men can learn from feminist and lesbian-feminist discursive practices is how to read and write from responsibly identified positions” (112). Nevertheless, there are drawbacks to any attempt to link, specifically, coming out to feminist theories of positionality; these drawbacks become evident from the critiques of coming out I alluded to earlier. The position “out of the closet,” much more than the “standpoint” of recent feminist theory, has become in the past two decades a mandated and delimited position, for both men and women. In the process of forging the imperative to come out, unfortunately, some lesbian and gay communities lost the sense that coming out was, as feminist theorists now argue about the feminist standpoint, only a beginning point from which to launch political action. The collective rallying cry “Out of the Closets, into the Streets” quickly became the demand that individuals simply “Come out of the closet.” Assimilation, rather than transformation, became the goal; increased visibility, it was thought, would lead to gay civil rights and acceptance into mainstream society. Martin Duberman explains that the Gay Activists Alliance emerged

as a breakaway alternative to the Gay Liberation Front, and would shortly supercede it.. . . Whereas GLF had argued that sexual liberation had to be fought for in conjunction with a variety of other social reforms and in alliance with other oppressed minorities, GAA believed in a single-minded concentration on gay civil rights and eschewed “romantic” excursions into revolutionary ideology (Cures, 213–14)⁵

Maintaining the GLF’s insistence that gay men and lesbians speak up but abandoning their politics of alliance, the GAA redirected the movement and circumscribed the meaning of coming out.

In addition to the dangers of quietism, coming out as a focus for gay and lesbian theory could also underwrite an apolitical essentialism. The narrowing of vision Duberman recounts could, and often does, narrow even further, so that coming out comes to signify solely the assertion of one’s (supposedly long-repressed) identity. This model of coming out, by itself, exhibits little concern for how lesbian or gay identities are socially constituted, for how they are intersected by other arenas of difference, or for what sort of collective political action might develop from an assertion of one’s gay or lesbian identity. Coming out here becomes a suspiciously white and middle-class move toward “self-respect,” not revolutionary social change, and many contemporary coming-out narratives might be seen as products of this shift toward individualism and essentialism. To be fair, however, John D’Emilio writes, in reference to the early gay liberationists:

For a gay man or lesbian of that time, I don’t think that it was possible to experience anything of comparable intensity. In a psychological sense it was an act of “revolutionary” import. No manner of political analysis could convince someone who had come out that he or she wasn’t turning the world inside out and upside down. (Making Trouble, 249)

Still, D’Emilio’s comment is less a trumpeting of the benefits of coming out than it is a note of caution. He is attempting to contextualize, but also look critically at, the psychological empowerment that coming out could bring: “Only later, as the movement matured, would it become clear that coming out was a first step only. An openly gay banker is still a banker” (Making Trouble, 249). By the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many lesbians and gay men no longer had the sense that coming out was a first step only. Coming out came to have one meaning, across all social locations: announcing one’s homosexuality. The act no longer necessarily carried the sense that lesbians and gays should collectively move to new locations; one could come out, and stay out, anywhere. Although “coming out conservative” would have been a logical impossibility to members of the GLF, by 1992, because of the ways in which the act had been redefined as the assertion of one’s essential, no longer repressed identity, it was the title of a popular book about Marvin Liebman, a formerly closeted anticommunist and conservative activist.

In a slightly different vein, Haraway, too, stresses that essentialism in its many guises is a pitfall for feminist theories of positionality, especially those, like hers, that foreground the “standpoints of the subjugated”: “But here lies a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions. ... A commitment to mobile positioning and to passionate detachment is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics” (191–92). Haraway’s disclaimers suggest that these essentializing tendencies might not engulf feminist theories of positionality, as long as “situating knowledge” entails continually and collectively repositioning identity: “The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another” (193).

An “innocent identity politics,” however, has already engulfed the coming-out narrative, according to many lesbian and gay critics. Diana Fuss sees even in the Radicalesbians a “tension between the notions of ‘developing’ an identity and ‘finding’ an identity” that “points to a more general confusion over the very definition of ‘identity’ and the precise signification of ‘lesbian’” (Essentially Speaking, 100). Biddy Martin discusses how, by the end of the 1970s, the imperative to come out is evolving into a predictable (and white) narrative, and how many coming-out stories “are tautological insofar as they describe a process of coming to know something that has always been true, a truth to which the author has returned” (89). Jeffrey Minson takes this accusation of tautology a step further, suggesting that “far from constituting a break from a repressive, closetted past, coming out might be situated as the latest in a long line of organised rituals of confession. . . . Sexual avowal therefore is a mode of social regimentation” (37). In Minson’s ominous scenario, coming out simply reproduces and undergirds the homophobic notion that homosexuality wholly explains a lesbian or gay person’s identity.

Finally, although Fuss’s, Martin’s, and Minson’s criticisms might also be leveled at some feminist theories of positionality, coming out may be problematic for a unique, more mundane reason: the imperative “Come out!” is by now, for many, a worn-out refrain. “National Coming Out Day” is at this point televised yearly on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and encouragement, such as the exhortation in my own campus newspaper to “come out, wherever you are, and friends won’t turn away” (Behrens, 19), often sounds like pandering for heterosexual “compassion.” Since coming out, according to this mainstream model, is virtually synonymous with a call to “respect yourself,” many gay and lesbian people are understandably bored or irritated with this focus on coming out and its product, the coming-out narrative.⁶ For example, David Van Leer insists that for White, coming out is “the quintessential gay experience”; but in a review of The Faber Book of Gay Short Stories, which White edited, Van Leer suggests that, in its “preoccupation with the opinion of others,” coming out “sometimes looks like a bid for heterosexual sympathy, even for absolution” (50). Sarah Schulman states more forcefully, “The coming out story should be permanently laid to rest. ... It was a defining stage we had to go through, but it doesn’t help us develop a literature true to our experience” (qtd. in Fries, 8).

Although I have no doubt that “we” will never construct a literature “true to our experience,” since that “experience” is multiple and that “truth” is always socially constituted and continually shifting, I am nonetheless sympathetic with Schulman’s frustration over the primacy given the coming-out narrative, especially when this focus comes at the expense of attention to other queer stories. Richard Hall, in a review of White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, is more tentative than Schulman, suggesting, “Not that the coming-out novel in its pristine liberationist form is dead. Maybe it’s just weary. . .. Here is another coming-up-and-out story, taking the narrator into adolescence and young manhood...” (27). Although Hall feels White’s novel is told with “wit, humor and aphoristic elegance” (27), his reservations about the coming-out novel are standard fare these days in reviews of contemporary lesbian and gay literature.⁷

Thus, despite a possible affinity with recent feminist theory, as a myth of “queer positionality,” coming out can be read as a worn-out concept. In the remainder of this chapter I explore more thoroughly why this is the case, but I also use the insights offered by feminist positionality theory to present an analysis that considers ways to revise or reclaim the coming-out story. Myths of queer positionality/identity need not be hopelessly lost on teleological journeys toward essential wholeness; “noninnocent” myths of queer positionality can be shaped in a queer world that is about “lived social and bodily realities [and] in which people are not afraid ... of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints,” as in the cyborg world Haraway envisions and argues for (154). A Boy’s Own Story and Zami: A New Spelli...